Never has a rightwing schoolmistress given so much pleasure to so many as did Ann Widdecombe in October 2000, when the Tory home affairs spokeswoman fell flat on her face after proposing, in her own inimitable style, a £100 on-the-spot fine for cannabis use.

The whole of the liberal left, the police and even the young trendies on the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, tore into her.

They chortled too when seven of her shadow cabinet colleagues rushed to confess they had experimented in their youth with cannabis. Then came the additional blow of Miss Widdecombe's nephew confessing to the News of the World that he had been jailed for drugs use. It was quite a kicking for an MP who had risen from Tory obscurity to media darling in less than a decade.

But these setbacks have not written off her hopes of winning the party leadership - and Miss Widdecombe may yet be the "second coming" of Thatcher - frustrating Michael Portillo's hopes of taking the same job if William Hague fails to dismantle the Labour government's majority at the next election. Her simple authoritarian appeal has a resonance among the grey-haired rank and file members who now dominate the shrunken Tory party and the increasingly rightwing and europhobic Tory MPs.

Partly because of her operatic style, and partly because of her absolute commitment to hard-right views, she has risen in prominence and is arguably the only Tory apart from Mr Hague and Mr Portillo most voters could name. For many, her proposals to extend sentences and spend millions on "secure" detention centres for the 75,000 asylum seekers arriving annually in Britain struck a chord.

Even her oft-proclaimed virginity seems more appealing to the primitive right than Mr Portillo's delayed admission of bisexuality - although some voters of course will be puzzled by her defence of capital punishment but opposition to fox hunting.

In an even more calculated fashion than her equally reactionary party colleague Baroness Young, Miss Widdecombe has assiduously cultivated Britain's "moral majority". A member of the society for the protection of the unborn child from her Oxford days, she was also an early opponent in the Commons of laws allowing easier abortion.

An opponent of ordaining women or divorced men, she first criticised very publicly, and then deserted the "weak kneed liberals" in the Anglican Church into which she was born to return to the Roman Catholic church in which she had been educated. Her reception into the Catholic Church was no private personal affair. Amidst massive self-generated publicity she became the first person since the Reformation to be received into the Catholic Church in the crypt of the Commons.

A fairly restrained eurosceptic herself, Miss Widdecombe is a throwback to the pre-war imperial Tories. Although born in Bath in 1947, her early life was spent in colonial Singapore where her father, James, was head of naval supplies. She still visits regularly her amah (nanny) there, and is a known admirer of the country's cleanliness under its authoritarian government.

When she returned to Bath, she attended a strict Catholic convent, La Sainte Union, where eating meat on Friday was still a mortal sin. She said: "Religion was pushed down your throat. We were forced to go to mass and benediction, but not allowed to attend our own [Anglican] church."

She went on to Birmingham University for a BA in Latin and then Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she studied PPE. Very attractive when young, she had a three-year romance at Oxford but it clearly ended before any lasting damage was done. Asked about sex, she answers: "Yuk! Spare me! That's one thing I don't miss." She prefers her cats.

Miss Widdecombe got the political bug at the Oxford Union, where she was secretary and then treasurer, and helped fellow Tory Michael Ancram in his two 1974 elections. In 1982 she made her name with Lady Olga Maitland as co-founders of women and families for defence, the CND-baiting group. She fought the hopeless seat of Burnley in 1979, where she halved Labour's majority. In 1983 she fought Dr David Owen at Plymouth Devonport, losing again.

Her luck turned when she was selected for the Tory stronghold of Maidstone, which had turned down Margaret Thatcher 25 years before, becoming its first woman MP in 1987. She made her maiden speech in a defence debate, enthusing about Trident as "an effective nuclear deterrent". Her headstrong qualities became apparent in support of David Alton's effort to drastically reduce the time limit for permitted abortions.

In 1988 she launched her own private member's bill to curb abortion, using tactics which affronted fellow anti-abortionist Tories such as Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman. A decade later, her office walls were still covered with posters showing foetuses.

She strengthened her reputation with the hard right by telling those who had voted for a Liberal Democrat in place of the IRA-murdered Ian Gow that the IRA would be "toasting their success".

When Mrs Thatcher was deposed in November 1990, Miss Widdecombe refused to dine with Edwina Currie and Emma Nicholson, whom she labelled as anti-Thatcher "traitors". She later backed Douglas Hurd as Mrs Thatcher's successor. Despite this, John Major promoted her to under secretary for social security, no doubt to appease Thatcherites. There she said there was "no reason why a person on social security should not be able to afford a normal healthy diet."

She became embroiled in serious controversy after her promotion to minister of state in the Home Office, under fellow rightwinger Michael Howard. She later fell out with Mr Howard over his sacking of Derek Lewis, director general of the prison service, and devastatingly accused him of having "something of the night" about him.

Not only did this quip destroy Mr Howard's hopes of becoming party leader after the 1997 election, it also made Miss Widdecombe something of a celebrity. A rare Tory woman, she rose rapidly with Hague as leader, joining the shadow cabinet as health spokesman in 1998. She made a barnstorming, noteless speech to the party conference - a performance she repeated in Blackpool in 1999, this time as shadow home secretary.

There she won some unexpected plaudits from the left for her emphasis on the need for prison reform and education. But those plaudits became brickbats in Bournemouth in 2000 where her ill thought out references to drugs enraged colleagues and left her looking foolish.